Schafft Co-Edits Book on Rural Education

by Joe Savrock (July 2010)

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Kai A. Schafft, Penn State associate professor of education and rural sociology, has co-edited a book with Alecia Youngblood Jackson, of Appalachian State University, titled “Rural Education for the Twenty-First Century: Identity, Place, and Community in a Globalizing World.”

Published by Penn State Press, the 328-page book explores the practices that offer both problems and possibilities for the futures of rural schools and communities, in the United States and abroad. It is part of the Rural Studies Series, sponsored by the Rural Sociological Society. The series features publications on a wide range of topics related to rural social issues.

Two of the book’s thirteen chapters were co-authored by Penn State College of Education faculty members--Jacqueline Edmondson, associate dean for undergraduate and graduate studies, and Susan C. Faircloth, associate professor of education and director of Penn State’s Center for the Study of Leadership in American Indian Education.

Schafft is director of Penn State’s Center on Rural Education and Communities and serves as editor for the peer-reviewed “Journal of Research in Rural Education.” His research interests broadly concern the relationship between social inequality, spatial inequality and rural development.